It has been common in the computer industry, more specifically with the management of data, to build relationships between many types of data that a business and its trading partners encounter on a recurring basis. This is certainly a common issue that a business in a growth phase must accommodate, especially when enhancing existing data management systems or when incorporating new data management systems. Tasks associated with these efforts are often referred to as integration or conversion projects.
Examples of when a business might encounter an integration or conversion project include:                Acquiring or merging with another business        Purchase of a new computer application or system that is not readily compatible with existing systems        Need to communicate electronic data with a business partner or associate        Creating new reports that span business areas or departments        
The integration or conversion project typically requires domain expertise of source and target systems at the data field level. The expert knowledge helps determine the proper data field mappings required to properly exchange data for integration or communication. These tasks are also referred to as mapping projects. These mapping projects can be described in detail, and the tasks then delegated to other teams not necessarily requiring specific expertise. In any case, these tasks are usually very time and resource intensive.
In the past few years several tools have been brought to market that facilitate these tasks, particularly with graphical user interfaces and simple conversion functions. But the data field mapping remains a manual process, and expert domain knowledge is still required to facilitate the process.
A need exists today to automate the development of field level relationships established between two or more databases, tables, and files, and with domain knowledge somewhat less than that of the level of expert. This automated data mapping must be faster than existing manual methods, and must require fewer resources as well. There should also be a means for verifying the accuracy of the mappings, overriding of some of the mappings if necessary, as well as the addition of relationships known as the result of expert domain knowledge of the data.
The present invention is designed to fulfill the above listed needs. The invention provides a tool that can build field level relationships between two or more disparate databases, tables, and files in an automated fashion, and do so without expert knowledge of the databases, tables, and files.
The foregoing and other objects and advantages will become more apparent when viewed in light of the accompanying drawings and following detailed description.